eCommerce/Web-to-Print SoftwareChoosing between EFI-Hosted or Customer-Hosted Options
EFI Digital StoreFront™, a customizable e-commerce shopping platform for print businesses, offers your customers a unique printer-centric shopping experience that allows them to easily navigate through your full suite of print products and services using a single, centralized platform for all your print products. Digital StoreFront enables you to meet diverse print communication needs by offering a unique shopping experience for top line growth. Digital StoreFront also provides a seamless onramp to print production workflows for bottom line growth making it easy to manage and control your print workflow.
Make Offering Digital StoreFront to Your Customers Easy
Whether you’re an in-plant printer, a small commercial printer or part of a larger print franchise, you’ll face the same pressures of delivering top quality work under tight deadlines to demanding customers. EFI™ makes offering Digital StoreFront to your customers easy. Digital StoreFront can be deployed at your location through a customer-hosted model or, you can let EFI do all the work, and purchase Digital StoreFront as an EFI-hosted ASP mode.
Why Choose the EFI-Hosted (Saas) Option?
The EFI-Hosted Model is ideal if you do not have the budget, staff or desire to purchase, manage and maintain all the hardware and software associated with EFI Digital StoreFront®. The model also has a predictable on-going cost and has rapid time-to-deploy.
Why Select the Customer-Hosted Option?
The Customer-Hosted Model works better for printers who have got the time, desire and resources to incorporate Digital StoreFront into their existing IT infrastructure and to manage it. This model gives you total control over your Web application on your network behind the firewall and all costs associated with it.
Comparison Grid
EFI-Hosted (SaaS) Model |
Customer-Hosted Model |
| Customer has little local IT resources and budget to invest, maintain and support this application. | Customer has strict IT restrictions regarding data storage and transfer outside their firewall. |
| Time-to-market is critical, and in-house IT project schedules do not allow rapid or focused attention. | Customer has an existing IT staff, which manages and maintains similar Web solutions. |
| Customer wants to fully outsource the solution including maintenance, backup and security concerns. | Customer wants full control of the solution as it pertains to maintenance and scalability (e.g., additional hardware, bandwidth, disk space and processing power). |
| Customer lacks the proper facility to host, support and maintain this solution 24/7, 365 days a year. | Customer typically has purchased Web solutions as self-hosted solutions and wants to remain consistent with past procurement decisions. |
| This solution has a known cost for investing, supporting and maintaining Digital StoreFront, while the customer-hosted solutions may require additional purchase of Microsoft SQL database and local database expertise. | Customer has a Microsoft® SQL database licensing in place and would like to leverage that investment internally. |